Hans Buwalda is an internationally recognized expert in test development and testing technology management and a pioneer of keyword-driven test automation. He was the first to present this approach, which is now widely used throughout the testing industry. Originally from The Netherlands, Hans now lives and works in California as CTO of LogiGear Corporation, directing the development of what has become the successful Action Based Testing™ methodology for test automation and its supporting TestArchitect™ toolset. Prior to joining LogiGear, Hans served as project director at CMG (now CGI) in the Netherlands. He is co-author of Integrated Test Design and Automation and a frequent speaker at international conferences.

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All Stories by Hans Buwalda

When looking at what the software market is currently talking about, the top item is DevOps and Continuous Integration/Deployment, which seems to be taking over some of the spotlight from agile and is now a widely accepted new normal. Hans Buwalda looks at where the future of software testing is going.

Testers have an important responsibility to protect and further their craft. Many people who want to be considered testers should engage in career development more than they might have in the past. Hans Buwalda highlights four areas that testers need to understand to stay relevant.

Software tests have to meet quality and robustness criteria that are similar to the application under test, but tests seldom get the attention and investments that the applications get. Hans Buwalda outlines why you should consider tests as products.

For testers, virtual machines can be a game changer. To what degree the game really changes depends largely on how an organization decides to work with virtual machines and how active the testers themselves are in recognizing and leveraging virtual machines’ possibilities.

Testing and automation have various paradoxes that are interesting to look at for insight into the challenges and limitations of our profession. Hans Buwalda describes these paradoxes and offers methods to bring about cooperation in teams, helping them achieve great automation results together.

When executing test modules, an interesting question to ask is “What needs to happen with issues that are found?” Hans Buwalda suggests making a distinction between issues found during a sprint and after the team has declared the functionality under test "done"—and describes how to proceed from there.

A major contributor to success in test automation is test design. If tests have many unnecessary detailed steps and checks, even a skilled automation engineer will not be able to make the automation efficient and maintainable. Hans Buwalda shares an example of a test design that is automation friendly.